Mediabytes

Complaining about someone re-writing reporting is kind of like kvetching about the rain: it’s pointless, because you’ll end up wet regardless of your protestations. Every journalist relies on other people’s work. I became a reporter because I wanted to find important ideas and share them. Whether that happens through my authorship, or someone’s summary, is less important to me than making sure the news is spread."

— New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, to Jim Romenesko

NYU’s Studio 20 and The Guardian contrast the media’s GOP debate questions with the issues the public is interested in. Turns out, they don’t match up.

Now THAT’s a news diet

From the Scottish Sun:

MUM-to-be Ann Curran’s pregnancy has left her with a bizarre craving for a taste of her local NEWSPAPER.

She can’t go a day without munching on the Dundee Evening Telegraph.

Ann, 35 — who is expecting her fourth child — even stashes shredded copies in her handbag for emergency snacks. And she insists the publication is the only newsprint with the proper flavour. She said: “I can’t help it.

“I could be sitting in the bingo hall and I’ll start ripping out pages of the newspaper.

“All the people look at me going, ‘What is she doing?’.

“I tear the white bits off the edges of the pages and keep them in a bag so I can eat them while I’m shopping.”

The increasingly steep growth of Apple device sales (via Chart: In Four Years, Apple Sold More iPhones Than All Macs Ever | TechCrunch)

Nice use of a comma in a headline, USA Today. (h/t Mignon Fogarty)

The new ‘bloggers vs. journalists’ debate is…

“Twitter did/did not break news” is the new “Bloggers vs Journalists”
— Martin Belam (@currybet) February 15, 2012

Basically, there [were] two ways to do it: get the product perfect in one market or go for a land grab approach. They went all in before they perfected the product and, in retrospect, that wasn’t ideal."

— The original sin of Patch, according to an anonymous former AOL executive directly involved in the company’s strategy (via Fortune Tech)

This whole concept of journalist has to be rethought. I’m sorry, I don’t care about journalists…I want fair minded, smart people who understand the world, who can interpret it and if they’re journalists, great. This notion that somehow you have to have done something to earn so-called journalist credentials? Stop. Stop…I think it’s unfair."

— MSNBC President Phil Griffin, on why many of its anchors are not trained journalists (via Poynter)

Big media companies love when their employees hit Twitter… Until something goes wrong."

— David Carr, Twitter Is All in Good Fun, Until It Isn’t - NYTimes.com

MG Siegler: Why most tech coverage is BS

parislemon:

The Wall Street Journal wrote it. Or The New York Times wrote it. It must be true! That means dick. A human being wrote that story. A human being that likely knew very little about the topic before they started writing — and maybe even less after.

Two different situations lead to the the same problem.

1) We have bloggers who sometimes are deeply embedded in the technology community and have quite a bit of insight and understanding about one or two companies/topics. But they have to write 4 or 5 or 6 or more stories a day as quickly as possible to feed the pageview beast.

2) We have more traditional journalists who are not deeply embedded in the technology community in any way and/or are forced to write for a more mainstream audience and end up writing obscenely bland stories about technology that only a brain-dead geriatric could love.

Both situations lead to stories that suck and/or are bullshit.

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